Glamourous Rags

Pandora's Handbag: Adventures in the Book Worldby Elizabeth Young

Published by Serpent's Tail, 366 pp. £14

The first time I talked to Liz Young, we argued about poetry: the last
time, we talked, it was about a book review. There are friends of your
heart and friends of your brain, and Liz was, in my life, far more the
latter - yet that does not mean that she was not important to me or that I
don't resent her death as much as that of any of my other dead friends.

Instead of her, we have Pandora's Handbag, the book she spent her last
months assembling, not just a stack of old reviews, but that stack
interleaved with enough commentary and hindsight to almost be an
intellectual autobiography. It is a good book, full of her precise
intelligent tone, but it makes me miss her living voice more than ever.

Liz was highly sceptical, as am I, of that pose of decorum which keeps
much reviewing superficially as impersonal as an inter-departmental
memorandum. I cannot pretend to separate my considered critical opinion of
these pieces out from my memory of Liz whispering chunks of them down the
phone in a voice that grew frailer with the years, but never less forceful
or intense.

At some point in late 1973, a friend took me to the basement flat Liz
shared with her then boyfriend because he thought I needed setting
straight about poetry. The Liz of that period was passionately committed
to the Black Mountain school - to Charles Olsen and Ed Dorn- and I was far
too caught up in writing bad verse that drew on late McNiece and early
Gunn. Neither of us was right, but we instantly realized that we liked
shouting at each other; Liz valued passionate opinion for its own sake.
And she was right enough that I soon stopped writing verse for good.

Once we had met, we never seemed to escape bumping into each other. Our
Leeds was a place where the poets dined with the feminists and the
feminists went drinking with the Trots and the Trots hung out with the
drag queens, where your landlady and your secretary were part of the same
CR group. Both of us were friends of the slightly regimented anarchist
commune where everyone signed up for duty on the rota-making rota before
realizing it was a hoax; Liz always denied it was her that did it, but it
was the sort of mischief she loved.

The Liz I met then was also, as she remained, spectacularly beautiful,
dark haunted eyes surrounded by elaborate calligraphies peering out from a
hennaed fringe. In one of the witty elegiac pieces here, she regrets the
loss of that beauty, but for once she was wrong. She lost litheness and
youth and health. And yet, it was important to Liz that loss of looks be
part of the myth she lived through; she needed that sense of having paid
something for wisdom and experience. She was fond of quoting Edith Wharton
- 'Take what you want and pay for it.'

It ought not to need saying, but does, that Liz, without ever being any
sort of joiner, was always a feminist critic and was always a woman of the
Left. She was always too concerned with, well, righteousness, to only be
the Goth dandy bad girl that was also a significant part of who she was.
When Private Eye's anonymous book people attacked her as a mere groupie of
the depraved for defending Dennis Cooper and A.M.Homes' The End of
Alice, it was their accusation of lack of seriousness that made her write
the indignant rebuttal reprinted here along with the Homes' review. Liz
retained enough of the strict Free Presbyterianism of her parents that she
insisted on finding lyrical moralism in some of the darkest writing of our
time.

That essential seriousness was part of what kept her working during the
wild years of her late twenties, when she combined avant-garde bookselling
at the much-missed Compendium in Camden Town with her time as a punk
groupie and heroin user, and during the last decade of her slow death from
cirrhosis. She was that rare thing, a critic who knows life outside the
rut and gossip of the literary world; she cared so much about books and
the life of the mind because she knew and cared about other things as
well.

In many of the pieces here, she talks about self-development through
books. It was American literature that kept her sane during the bullying
Leavisite miserabilism of the pre-Swinging Sixties "the opportunity
enjoyed by adults, shielded by a thin veneer of apparent respectability
for indulging in unlimited brutality, knowing there would be no comeback'.
It was from books, chosen by herself and hidden from authority that would
burn them that she learned to take those things she needed to assemble her
adolescent and adult identities; the point though was not to stay with
books alone.

Myths are for living with and through; it is not enough to read Huysmans
'A rebours'. You must create your own artificial paradise, scented with
Sobranie smoke and patchouli oil, cluttered with books, magazines and
glittery tchotchkes. If you are not, in the end, a poet, you can at least
be a critic, a critic maudite.

Liz was as good at being a potentially doomed razzle-dazzle party girl as
she was at being a critic; her profile of Pamela des Barres, friend and
sexual associate of Sixties rock stars, is all the better a piece of
writing for its empathy. "She was like flowers or a ribbon or sweeties or
a cute cuddly toy; she was for giggles and gossip and fun...' Liz had
enough dangerous fun in her time that she had no side to her, no sense of
being better than other people.

Liz was enough of a proto-punk, a proto-Goth, that even in the early
Seventies, she was fascinated by the darker side of dandyism. She wrote
well about contemporary horror - one of the ways we met again after a
period of estrangement was that our interest in genre fiction overlapped
somewhere around the early career of Poppy Z Brite - and was fascinated by
the literature of true crime. Part of that honesty in which her
seriousness was rooted even at its most game-playing was her preparedness
to own up; she wrote as well about 'low' genres as she did about
'respectable' literature.

Part of what she liked about horror and true crime was that, at their
best, they are forms which avoid sentimentality - Poppy Z Brite's rentboys
and vampires dance around foggy New Orleans a deal less lugubriously than
Anne Rice's. Liz was not overfond of writing the killer review, but, if
mawkish emotion and crudely moralistic plotting set her teeth on edge, she
could be very rude indeed. 'Turtle Moon ...is a novel for those who dot
their 'i's with flowers, who communicate by greeting-card...and cherish
their inner child'

More usually, though, she avoided as much as she could writing about books
she did not respect; though the wealth of material here is less than half
of her journalistic output, she was not a reviewer to whom all literary
editors automatically turned. Her critical sympathies were broad but
unpredictable; though very far from being a professional Scot, she was
keen on the younger Scots novelists. Given his subject matter, Irvine
Welsh might have been expected, but she was equally fond of Alan Warner
-'No male writer has ever mastered the rituals of makeup in the way
Warner has'- and Alasdair Gray. She combined fondness for gloomy writers
like Will Self with high praise of the technical mastery of Terry
Pratchett's Discworld novels. She was a complete critic because she was a
broad-minded one.

Some of the best pieces here, though, are not reviews - they are essays
about cats, or fragments of memoir, or authoritative accounts of the state
of the short story. Liz simply wrote well - her handful of short stories
were excellent and there are years worth of journals sitting in a box
somewhere.

As Will Self points out in his excellent memoir/introduction, Liz had
strong views about the things that were killing her - the medical
profession's neglect of the Hepatitis C epidemic from which her cirrhosis
derived and the folly of a War on Drugs that was always mostly a war on
drug users. Her articles, from her last years, on these topics show us a
different Liz, one less concerned with elegant dandyism and distinctly out
of love with Amerika; she did fancy better than anyone, but she could also
write plain, clean and angry.

The thing that distressed Liz most about her last illness was the fear
that her mind might go and she would not get it back, even if the last
minute reprieve of a transplant came in time, as, in the event, it did
not. 'Oh,' I was able to say to her on the phone.' Inga Clendinnen has a
new book about getting her mind back after the surgery' (I had reviewed it
in the NS, interested in it partly because of Liz) and send her my copy to
read. What consoles at the end, what remains of us, is sometimes just
books, and chatter about books.

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